Photography Blog

What Camera Is The Best?

Let us take a time travel!

The Sony a200

Sometime in 2014 I had no personal camera of mine and as everyone would do, I was window shopping. I spent hours on B&H, amazon and the likes. My interests were filled in the expensive Canon cameras, my friends had told me that Canon was great if not the best camera manufacturer out there and I was interested in having the best.

Come back to June 8, 2017 and the only camera I’ve owned are Sony digital cameras. Okay, so wonder why I didn’t get Canon? I was a bit financially lower than canon standards in the market and I even had to settle for a fairly used Sony a200. Before that day, I had never knew Sony made cameras, I felt the dealer whom I bought it from was tired of not being able to sell it and just decided to push it to me but I will gladly say it was the greatest decision I’ve ever taken, buying a 2006 camera in 2014!.

The Sony a200 which is 10.2mp, had an hotshoe that till today looks weird. The hotshoe was Sony’s previous design so I was limited on modern day accessories. I had got with it a 1993 Konica Minolta speedlite and together we went places. One thing the camera taught me was to be in control of the camera and not the camera in control of me.The images which I shot with it are very much available on the website and played a big part in my mini success story. The Sony a58 is my current camera and it’s doing great.

Some days ago, a new student at the academy asked what camera he should get for his studies and I was about to list a set of cameras then he popped up that he had gotten a D3200 as a birthday gift and then he asked I was going to advise him to get cameras like Canon and my response was simply “Every brand is good” When Sope Photography was a student at the academy, he was always shocked that I shot with Sony and I told him, “The photographer is the determiner of the quality of the image, not the camera ”

There’s absolutely little to no difference in cameras!

Okay so we’ve got several camera levels; entry level DSLR, mid-range cameras and high – end DSLRs. You tend to believe that the high end cameras are what you should always target but the truth is that every camera has its purpose. How would I buy an high end Sony a7rii which is a whooping 42 megapixels camera and has a lot of functions I might not need to use for once?

“You can never buy it all in photography so don’t buy it at all”

Feeling angry with my quote above? It is actually the truth. There are so many cameras, lenses and gadgets out there that buying it all would seem impossible so just don’t think of owning it all. All you need is what you will need. As a portrait and event photographer, I need a good camera (midrange or high-end DSLR) 50mm and a zoom lens, studio backdrops, 2- 4 lights (you can save cost and luggage with speedlites). Simple! I would be doing myself harm buy owning excessive gears and Eric Kim would say,

“It’s GAS, Gear Acquisition Syndrome”

My nephew, Shalom.

So which camera brand is best for me?
I told the new student that if I’d buy a new camera outside Sony, I’d get a Fujifilm or Leica camera and he was puzzled. He pondered, where is Nikon and Canon, he hadn’t heard of those camera brands before. The key thing to understand is that every camera brand is in business and has to compete with one another and of such reason would want to sell more than the other, if some brands are more popular and high selling, that doesn’t mean others aren’t good. I once saw Tope Harpload say he wanted an Hasselblad camera. Even I won’t mind having it. The key thing is to get yourself good at first, become a master if the camera and then any camera would do the deal for you. My last word of advice would be